Good-Faith Rules Interpretations Don’t Fix Poorly-Written Rules

Introduction

The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide changed a lot from the 2014 version. Among other improvements, the first chapter of the book now addresses the human parts of running a game. Basic, essential things like finding and coordinating a group, managing players, and other things which DMs and GMs have had to learn the hard way for 50 years.

It offers advice on catering to players’ varying preferences, keeping the game fair and fun for everyone, safety tools (though it weirdly avoids using the terms “safety tools” or “lines and veils”), and how to handle a few specific challenges while running a game.

On Players Exploiting Rules

Under the section labeled “Respect for the DM”, advice is offered for how to handle common problems arising from player behavior. Dice cheating, derailing the plot, metagaming, antisocial behavior, and players exploiting the rules.

I promise this isn’t an article about my feelings being hurt by this somehow. No one at RPGBOT is losing sleep over the DMG advocating for good player behavior.

Rules Aren’t Physics

This section is aimed at things like the Peasant Railgun, but also addresses some other challenges.

I don’t know the original source, but the premise of the peasant railgun is that you line up an army of peasants to move an object down the line using readied actions, then switch to real-world physics when the object is thrown at a target with incredible destructive force. This has obviously never made sense within the rules of any edition of DnD because DnD has never been an accurate physics simulation. Among other issues, it has no concept of momentum.

Outright declaring that rules aren’t physics prevents players from attempting things like the Peasant Railgun, but it also removes arguments over the specifics of carrying heavy and bulky objects and around somewhat unbelievable interactions between creatures of varying sizes, such as a 4-foot tall dwarf grappling and dragging a 10-foot tall ogre.

The Game Is Not an Economy

DnD is not a game about money. We continue to track wealth down to individual coins because the “go on adventures and get loot” aspect of the game is still very satisfying. But most groups outright ignore daily living expenses, the cost of ammunition, the cost of rations, etc. because it doesn’t matter enough to justify the effort to track all of that.

Examinations of the economy indicated by the cost of goods and services in the Player’s Handbook reveal that things are fairly absurd, that costs of living don’t really make sense, and the cost of individual goods most closely reflect the overinflated economy of a boom town in the middle of a gold rush.

Players breaking the economy in 5e has always been fairly easy. The ability to sell spellcasting services, to craft and sell expensive poisons, and the ability to turn garbage into wealth using spells has always been available to players looking to generate money.

This section gives license for DMs to say “Hey, that’s not why we’re here. Please stop.” Breaking the economy can be fun, in theory, but it takes a fun game about going on adventures with your friends and turns it into competitive spreadsheeting.

I enjoy competitive spreadsheeting as much as the next person, but it’s not why I play DnD. It’s why I play Pathfinder. I’m saving up for my first armor runes, and I am excitedly counting every copper until I can get them.

Combat Is for Enemies

This one deserves some copy+paste:

“Some rules apply only during combat or while a character is acting in Initiative order. Don’t let players attack each other or helpless creatures to activate those rules.”

This is all very reasonable. Combat features are clearly intended for use against enemies during combat situations. This is aimed at shenanigans involving a bag of rats which abuse a collection of largely harmless captive creatures in order to capitalize on combat features while the player isn’t in any danger.

It also discourages using other player characters for those same shenanigans. The game doesn’t expect your party to slap each other in order to trigger the Peace Cleric’s free teleportation. It doesn’t expect you to repeatedly beat an ally unconscious in order to trigger things that take effect when an ally falls to 0 hp or when you reduce another creature to 0 hp.

It also discourages PVP, which is often the end result of truly unpleasant behavior by one or more players. Stealing from your party, attacking them in combat, and generally being an antisocial menace have been problems for longer than I’ve been alive. Players shouldn’t be victimizing each other, and they shouldn’t resort to PVP combat to resolve out-of-character disagreements. Use words.

Rules Rely on Good-Faith Interpretation

This section aims to combat intentionally misreading rules or stretching those rules in order to gain some advantage in the game. Rules abuse, plain and simple.

Some portion of these issues come from the character optimization community. RPGBOT is a part of that community. At the same time, we’re not offended by the DnD design team trying to discourage rules abuse. This is a game written by people, and people are fallible. Errors, edge cases, and loopholes find their way into the rules. We get that.

It also means that we can’t look at places where the rules are silent and say that our interpretation of the rules is “Rules as Written” because there is explicitly nothing written. “The rules don’t say that I can’t” is not firm footing. Treantmonk uses the term “Turdsick” to describe these bad-faith interpretations.

But good-faith interpretation of the rules only gets us so far.

Good-Faith Interpretation Doesn’t Fix Broken Rules

In some cases where the rules are unclear, where there’s a clear error, or where some text appears to be simply missing, players can frequently fill in the gaps. We can frequently figure out what the designers intended based on flavor text, by looking at similar examples, or by agreeing upon a reasonable interpretation of confusing wording.

But sometimes the rules are just broken.

Let’s look at a few examples from the 2024 Player’s Handbook.

See Invisibility as a Counter to Stealth

See Invisibility now negates the ability to hide.

From the Rules Glossary’s entry on the Hide action:

“On a successful check, you have the Invisible condition”

And from the spell See Invisibility‘s description:

“you see creatures and objects that have the Invisible condition as if they were visible”

Therefore, See Invisibility allows you to see creatures that are successfully hidden. It’s very easy to tell ourselves “that’s clearly not what they intended to happen”, but then why would they force the Invisible condition into the rules for hiding? Why not just stick with the rules text from 2014 which has worked fine for a decade?

This also creates an odd situation where a creature with See Invisibility can see a hidden creature, but hasn’t “found” them because they haven’t spent an Action to attempt a Wisdom (Perception) check to do so.

Polymorph as a Massive Pool of THP

The updated version of the Polymorph now grants Temporary Hit Points instead of giving the target a separate pool of hp. This was a simplification made across all shape changing abilities, including things like Wild Shape (which also doesn’t specify when the THP disappear). However, Polymorph doesn’t specify that the THP disappear when the spell ends. So how do these THP work?

We can look at similar rules examples. False Life is a spell that grants THP and does exactly nothing else, so it’s great to look at for comparison. It has an instantaneous duration, and when the spell “ends” after it is cast, the THP remain. Absent any explicit exceptions, we fall back to the core rules for Temporary Hit Points as specified in the Rules Glossary and the Damage and Healing section.

“Temporary Hit Points last until they’re depleted or you finish a Long Rest (see the rules glossary).”

This means that, rules as written, the THP from Polymorph, Wild Shape, and similar effects all remain in place until depleted or until the player completes a Long Rest.

It would make sense that these THP disappear when the effects that produce them end. That is how I plan to handle things in my home games. However, that is very explicitly against the text of the rules, and we have no idea if this rules interaction was intentional because the designers haven’t said anything on the subject. We’re left with the unpleasant choice of fixing the rules ourselves or letting a clearly silly rule stand as written.

Suggestion as an Enormous Problem

The updated version of Suggestion made some shocking changes from the 2014 version. The 2014 version included some restrictions which admittedly were left up to DM interpretation, and could therefore lead some disagreement at the table.

“The suggestion must be worded in such a manner as to make the course of action sound reasonable. Asking the creature to stab itself, throw itself onto a spear, immolate itself, or do some other obviously harmful act ends the spell.”

While this was somewhat vague, it prevented things like telling a creature to kill their friends, to petrify themselves, to tell their enemies all of their secrets, or to attempt physically impossible tasks. The 2024 rules attempt to remove the “mother, may I?” aspect of the spell in order to quell these disagreements. However, the changes made things considerably worse by putting all of the power in the caster’s hands limited only by word count, achievability, and hit point damage.

“The suggestion must sound achievable and not involve anything that would obviously deal damage to the target or its allies.”

Here are some examples of how to use this entirely within the rules that are clearly more powerful than the spell is intended to be.

• To a ruler of some sort: “Declare war on the neighboring nation, and conquer as much of their territory as you can within the next 24 hours.”
• To a ruler of some sort: “Outlaw these people I don’t like, and send written declarations to everyone in the country.”
• “Suffocate yourself as close to death as possible.”
  • Exhaustion doesn’t cause damage. Hitting 6 levels of damage outright kills the creature. But for the sake of argument, we’ll say that instantly killing a creature counts as “dealing damage” in an effort to remain within good-faith rules interpretations.
• “Sign this legal document.”

None of these things deal damage to the target or its allies, but they are absolutely unreasonable. The 2014 rules at least required the players to put in some creative effort.

We Need The Rules to Be Fixed

Good-faith rules interpretations are good. The official text advocating for good behavior is a good thing, and I’m happy to see it. But calling for good-faith rules interpretation isn’t a panacea for rules issues.

To put it plainly: we need errata to fix issues in the 2024 rules, and no amount of good-faith rules interpretation will fix those issues.

The Player’s Handbook has been out for barely a month, the DMG is brand new, and we haven’t seen the 2024 Monster Manual yet. We have yet to receive significant errata for the 2024 rules, though updates to the text on DnDBeyond have corrected a few things like shields not specifying how you don/doff them. This hasn’t been well documented, so we don’t even know how much DnDBeyond differs from the physical books.

I hope that we’ll see a compiled Sage Advice document when the Monster Manual releases. If nothing else, a compiled list of the changes from DnDBeyond made available to people not using DnDBeyond would be huge. Admitting that there are known issues in the rules text and committing to improving them will do a lot to make the 2024 rules update more palatable to a community that already views the new rules with mixed feelings.